Richard Sennett – The Fall of the Public Man

“The coffeehouse was a meeting-place common to both London and Paris in the late 17th and the early 18th Century, though, due to England’s greater control of the coffee market, the coffeehouses were more numerous in London. The coffeehouse is a romanticized and overidealized institution: merry, civilized talk, bonhomie, and close friendship all over a cup of coffee, the alcoholic silence of the gin shop as yet unknown. Moreover, the coffeehouses performed a function which makes it asy to romanticize them in retrospect: they were the prime information centers in both cities at this time. Here papers were read, and at the beginning of the 18th Century the owners of London coffeehouses began to edit and print newspapers themselves, applying in 1729 for a monopoly in the trade. Such business activities as insurance, which relied on information about the likelihood of success in a particular venture, grew up in coffeehouses; Lloyd’s of London began as a coffeehouse, for instance” (Sennett, 1978: 81).

Sennett, R. (1978). The fall of public man. Peunguin Books.p.81